


broken knife

by Destina



Category: The Outsiders - S. E. Hinton
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-24
Updated: 2010-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-14 01:35:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/143919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Destina/pseuds/Destina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It seems to Johnny he's been watching Dallas Winston his whole life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	broken knife

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jasmasson](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jasmasson/gifts).



> This is a Yuletide Treat for jasmasson. Thank you to dotfic for beta.

It seems to Johnny he's been watching Dallas Winston his whole life, so he knows what's what when it comes to Dally. Everything about Dally is sharp, from the way he cuts his hands through the air when he talks, to the way he uses his knuckles on Bo Taylor's nose to break it. Sharp things can't be hurt. They do the hurting. Everybody knows that's how it is.

Johnny is soft. Soft and quiet and he tries not to be seen, but they always notice him anyway. One after the other, all those fathers and uncles his mother brings in, the fat ones and tall ones, the ones who like belts and straps, the ones who think hairbrushes are made for breaking over Johnny's back.

"Gotta toughen you up, kid," Dally says, cuffing him behind the ear. They wrestle a little, elbows flying, soft puffs of laughter between grunts of effort, but Johnny always gives up first. Too soft, Johnny thinks, too weak, too little, not enough. He dreams of the day he'll be tall, taller than Dally even, not the runt of the litter.

Dally never asks about how it is at home. Everything is written on Johnny's skin, every argument, each bad day, every break-up his mother says he caused, even the good times when he forgets he's not supposed to share in the happy things. Sometimes Dally touches the evidence, his eyes dark and sad. Then he gets mad, and he won't talk to Johnny. He goes away to steal things, to punk other kids for what looks cool.

When he comes back, he's always torn and bleeding, but so much calmer, and Johnny can sit with him and have a smoke, maybe play cards a while.

Johnny thinks maybe those card games with Dally are the closest he will ever get to normal.

~*~

The first time it happens, Johnny is eleven, and Dally is so much older -- almost 15. Johnny's waiting for Dally so they can go down the corner store and read the comics. Dally stands at the curb and whistles, and Johnny turns his head toward the sound, happy for the first time in days. Beer cans and newspapers litter the room, his mother asleep in her chair, but the new boyfriend -- Frank -- is watching with narrowed eyes as Johnny grabs his jacket.

"Where the hell you going, you little shit?" Frank likes to throw his weight around. Johnny's used to it. He ducks his head down.

"Just goin' with my-"

The backhand comes swift and hard, knocking Johnny off his feet. He sits up, dazed, and tries to find Frank's face, the place where his voice is. "You ask my permission first, you get me?"

"Please?" Johnny chokes out.

"That's better. I-"

Then Frank stops talking, because Dally has just hit him, punched him in the jaw where all those angry words live. Dally seems bigger than Frank, bigger than anything in the world, and he punches Frank again, and again, until Frank falls down, spitting and choking, his angry hands flapping in front of him to fend Dally off.

"C'mon," Dally yells, putting a hand out for Johnny, who gets up and slides his cold hand into Dally's hot one, and then they run. Past neighbors outside on their porches, past cars barreling down the street, into the vacant lot near Phillips hardware.

Dally puts his back to the wall, and then he looks hard at Johnny, grabs his face with both hands. "Shit, Johnny," he says, and there are tears in his eyes.

Johnny puts one hand up to his face, to cover the mark, but Dally drops down on one knee and smacks his hand away. "Told you, you need to toughen up, Christ."

Then he sits down hard on the ground and runs a hand through his hair, watching the street like he expects something coming.

After a second, Johnny drops down beside him. Their shoulders touch, and Dally's so tense Johnny feels the shake in his muscles. He wants to say, thank you. Maybe say, you're a hero. None of the words will come.

"I'm no good," Dally says, pounding his fist twice into the gravel littering the lot. He grabs a handful of rocks and flings them sideways. They scatter into the street. "Won't take them long to catch up to me."

Johnny presses his face against the soft leather of Dally's jacket, the smell of it warm and familiar.

You're everything good, he wants to say. It's the only reliable truth he knows. Someday he'll find the words. Someday.

~*~

Dally gives him things, nothing of consequence, just trinkets. An empty Band-Aid tin that Dally passes to him when they're out drinking one night by the wash. It's smooth, hollow; it's like the inside of Johnny's chest, anytime he's not with Dally. He packs it up with his smokes so there's no space left for things to rattle around inside.

There are other things, too. A plastic whistle Dally's kid sister found in a cereal box, or pieces of gum in shiny foil. All of them treasures to Johnny, who has nothing of his own, except Dally. Always Dally.

Dally gives him a switchblade, one of Dally's old ones, before he traded up.

"Got a chip out of the blade," Dally tells him, thumbing it open so Johnny can see the jagged piece at the tip. "Might as well take it."

Johnny doesn't have it long. There's nothing he can do with it. He'll never use it, because he's not like Dally. He buries it in a cigar box out back of the house, a little piece of safety right nearby.

**

The next time one of them touches him, it's two years later, and Carl doesn't leave a mark where it can be seen, but Johnny shivers and cowers and won't let Dally touch him. Dally puts a coat around him and rests a hand in his hair. The anger in Dally is like a living thing. It winds in him, through his blood, twisting him up.

"You wait here," Dally says, and Johnny stays in the cold field, shivering, because he knows what Dally's going to do. He wants it to happen, or maybe he doesn't, but there's never been much he can say to Dally to change his mind. Maybe he could this time. Maybe.

He doesn't try.

Time goes slower in the dark. The wait is long.

When Dally comes back, his face is bleeding, his knuckles bruised, and there's blood on his shirt. He sits down and smokes a cigarette with shaking hands.

Johnny reaches out to take the dark wet edges of Dally's shirt between two fingers. It's sticky, where he touches. Proof that Carl won't be messing with him anymore. The wind carves a circle around them, lifting leaves and tossing them back down, and Johnny asks, "What did you do?"

"Never mind," Dally says, jerking away. "Fuckin' asshole...he won't be after you again."

Johnny looks up at him with the beginnings of fear - not for himself, but for anyone in Dally's way.

Johnny can't see putting them in Dally's way. Not now that he knows.

When he goes home, there's no one there. For a while after, his mother won't look at him, won't speak to him. It's better than it usually is, quiet, and Carl doesn't come around anymore. It's like he was never there.

After that, none of the new ones touch him. They only yell and scream and shout, but the words are like bottles and yardsticks on his skin, breaking through and making him bleed where no one can see. Splinters remain, and their constant scrape across his nerves make him shiver like a beat-down dog.

**

Dally gets thrown into juvie and doesn't come out for a while.

Sometimes Johnny thinks of him in there, what it's like to be trapped with the worst guys from the neighborhood. A lot of his friends have been locked up, some longer than others. It's a badge of honor, a point of pride, and when Dally comes out he'll tell Johnny stories about how he lived in there.

Johnny has other friends. Ponyboy's a couple years younger than him, but they've always been close. He likes it at the Curtis house, but he never hangs out there if Dally's around. Darry and Dally don't get along too great, and Johnny gets enough of fighting at his own house.

Once, Darry says Dally was born for the cage. Johnny leaves Ponyboy's house then, leaves and doesn't go back for weeks. There's a letter burning a hole in his pocket, Dally's sloped handwriting jumping off the page at him, a thousand words about what Johnny needs to do while he's gone. Are you going to school, better stay with Pony, where's that knife I gave you, don't you do anything dumb, I'll fucken kill you if you do anything dumb.

He writes back, the letter open on one knee and his paper on the other. Dally's letter is limp, it's been folded so many times, and the pencil markings are worn away at the folds. Johnny smoothes them again and comes away with grey on his fingertips.

Don't worry, he writes. Everything A-OK.

"You think Dally's all right in there?" he asks Pony one night, while Soda and Darry are fixing dinner.

Pony looks up from the western they're watching on the TV and blinks. "Sure," he says. "Ain't nothin' Dally can't handle in there. Shoot, I bet he's more worried about what he can't handle out here."

Johnny's hanging around down the block from the juvenile hall the day Dally gets out. Dally swaggers up, a cigarette between his lips, his hair not combed, and grins at Johnny. He hugs him with one arm. He smells like cheap soap and his shirt is scratchy. Johnny knows he was stupid to worry.

Dally buys him the blue plate special at Clara's Diner, then shoves his own plate at Johnny after he finishes half his mashed potatoes. He watches Johnny eat, and it seems like he's hungry for something the waitress can't bring him.

**

Time comes when Johnny's too old to let Dally fight his battles anymore. He takes a couple bad beatings, and Dally's lips thin out when he sees him, but all he says is, "You still got that knife?"

Truth is, Johnny'd almost forgotten about it. But he digs it out and trades up, like Dally did once, for something sharp and whole. He can barely stand to touch it, and in his back pocket, it feels like a weight too heavy to carry.

He and Pony hang out more, and Dally gets harder around the edges. It seems like he's angry all the time. Sometimes, he reminds Johnny of the worst of the men who've cycled though his house, all mouth and edges and attitude. Other times, he's just Dally, giving Johnny half of whatever he's got and never thinking twice about it.

Sodapop looks at Johnny with kind eyes the second time Dally goes to juvie, the time he's locked up for six months. "Seems like you're just about all he's got to keep him right," he says to Johnny, oblivious to how Johnny's chest gets too tight when he hears it.

No, Johnny thinks, it's the other way around. He still has the Band-Aid tin, the whistle, the dog-eared pack of playing cards. He can still trace the last scars anybody ever left on him, before Dally made it right. He can feel Dally's hand on his neck, gentle, every time he gives Johnny a one-armed hug, and how the fight goes out of him when Johnny hugs him back.

He thinks about the grin on Dally's face and he knows someday he'll find a way to tell Dally, let him know everything he's kept, everything it's meant. He'll tell him they should get out of here, go to Texas or Mexico and start something new, and let the rest of it fall behind. Someday he'll tell him.

Someday.


End file.
